It’s official, I finally got a Treo 700p for Verizon. Don’t worry, I got it real cheap on eBay. My main reason for getting the 700p now, versus the 755p or waiting for something else to arrive is two-fold:
* I must have my full size SD cards.
* I was using my Treo 650 every day tethered to my laptop (with PDANet) for data access on the go. The 650 is soooo slowwww, and the 700p has high-speed EVDO data connection. So much better.

Now, I beg of the My Mobile Obsession readers: “I need a copy of the Verizon Treo 700p Update 1.10”. As many of you know, Palm pulled it off their website due to customer issues.

Between you and me, all my Palm devices have/had issues….I’m used to it and will deal with it. I just NEED the update so I don’t have to reinstall all my apps again once the next update comes out.

Here’s a quick review of my experience on the 700p. So far, it’s got some wicked lag issues (I see what everyone was complaining about). I generally only see the lag when my phone/data connection is weak or dropped. Other than that, the UI is a bit refreshed with minor tweaks from the 650. My must have apps, PocketTunes 4.0.3 and Softick Audio Gateway 1.14 are running quite well. I’m now using VersaMail 3.5.1 to wirelessly sync my Calendar and Contacts. Though VersaMail has it’s issues:
1) The autosync feature never works.
2) There no option to sync Tasks. What!!?? You can do Mail, Calendar, and Contacts….but just ignore Tasks. What’s the deal with that?!

So, ChatterEmail lives on on the 700p. I will continue to use it for mail.

More updates as they come in.

For now, I may just stick with Palm Garnet OS and ride it to the end….then see what the hub-bub around the Linux-based Palm OS II is all about.

iPHone, sorry. You lost me at no keyboard.
Win Mo, I think you will lose me to Palm OS II. Let’s see when the Win Mo 6 with 320×320 Treo comes out…and then we shall talk again.

Well, I have been on a blog hiatus for two months…work and family schedule has kept me away from updating My Mobile Obsession. But, I have kept up on the news.

Today’s announcement immediately forced me to postpone my hiatus. Not since the announcement that Sega was “end of lifing” the Dreamcast to focus solely on software, has something this big come along.

The Foleo is DEAD!!! WTF. Don’t get me wrong, this is good news to me (and I’m sure you too). But, holy F****** S***! On possibly the day that it was going to be released for purchase, Palm drops this email in my inbox:

(Side Note: I have lot’s of Treo 700p, Centro, Gandolph, and VersaMail news to share. But now back to the headlines).

As many of you are aware, we are in the process of building our next generation software platform. We are very excited about how this is coming together. It has a modern, flexible UI, instant performance, and an incredibly simple and elegant development environment. We are working hard on this platform and on the first smartphones that will take advantage of it.
In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts. To that end, and after careful deliberation, I have decided to cancel the Foleo mobile companion product in its current configuration and focus all our energies on delivering our next generation platform and the first smartphones that will bring this platform to market. We will, of course, continue to deliver products in partnership with Microsoft on the Windows Mobile platform, but from our internal platform development perspective, we will focus on only one.
Because we were nearly at the point of shipping Foleo, this was a very tough decision. Yet I am convinced this is the right thing to do. Foleo is based on a second platform and a separate development environment, and we need to focus our efforts on one platform. Our own evaluation and early market feedback were telling us that we still have a number of improvements to make Foleo a world-class product, and we can not afford to make those improvements on a platform that is not central to our core focus. That would not be right for our customers or for our developer community.
Jeff Hawkins and I still believe that the market category defined by Foleo has enormous potential. When we do Foleo II it will be based on our new platform, and we think it will deliver on the promise of this new category. We’re not going to speculate now on timing for a next Foleo, we just know we need to get our core platform and smartphones done first.
I would like to thank our customers for their interest in Foleo. I know there will be disappointed folks who were looking forward to carrying a Foleo for all their mobile computing needs. I am certainly one of them. I would also like to thank the developers who have supported our Foleo efforts. They have been loyal to Palm and have worked hard to deliver some compelling solutions on the Foleo platform. I know that they will understand that the right thing to do for the long run is to focus on one platform that will live for years, rather than invest energy in a one-off solution. We will make every effort to make sure we bring our developers forward to our next generation platform.
This decision will require us to take a limited charge of less than $10 million dollars to our earnings. This is a lot of money, but it is a small price relative to the costs that would be required to support two platforms going forward. This decision is in the best interest of our customers, our team, our products and our shareholders. I hope this renewed focus at Palm will allow us to deliver more compelling solutions to our core smartphone market, and it will allow us to position ourselves for the long run around one Palm experience.